It’s a question that’s plagued Americans ever since medicine became a business, and a thriving one at that. It’s something Florida’s Democratic U.S. Representative Alan Grayson is very passionate about. He summed up the Republican Party’s healthcare plan as “if you do get sick, die quickly,” and that’s an accurate summation, I’d say.
Obamacare, despised by the Republican Party, got the US a tiny bit of the way there
Grayson is a big, big fan of the Affordable Care Act, which was put through by the wonderful Barack Obama to get Healthcare coverage to uninsured Americans, because the fact of the matter is, the statistics on that are staggering.
45,000 Americans die every year simply because they can’t afford health insurance. More people die of not being able to afford the doctors’ precious time than of kidney disease. It’s absurd. In England, it doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are, you get healthcare. It’s free. It’s fair.
American politicians (well, the Democrats at least) have been trying to figure out how to get universal healthcare in their country for decades and it’s always left them baffled. Obama seemed determined to figure it out, and he didn’t. He got halfway there with ObamaCare and he got crucified for it. It was divisive, to say the least. Hillary Clinton’s been working on it since the eighties. She travelled the world to find out how it works.
So far, nothing beyond ObamaCare has happened to get the wheels in motion, and so those 45,000 will continue to die every year.
So, what the hell’s going on? Is it all one big conspiracy? It can’t be that difficult. England figured it out, for crying out loud. I reached out to Michael Bell from the NHS Trust to see if he could answer the one burning question I had: How come England has universal healthcare but America doesn’t?
Long story short, he couldn’t
Long story long, here’s what he told me: “Not sure there is a brief answer to this. Our respective institutions and approaches to public policy are rooted in historical and cultural perspectives that are different for each country. These perspectives are then reflected in the political decisions made.
We can be proud that the NHS provides universal access and equivalent health outcomes to the U.S. whilst spending a considerably lower proportion of national income on healthcare than the American system.”
Thanks, Mike
So, what have we learned? We should be proud of our universal healthcare system, which works somehow in a way that it doesn’t work in the U.S. Somehow the UK can provide free healthcare whereas America has to charge.
What I think is going on – and this is just a theory, mind you – is that the big business-loving Republicans are secretly pulling the strings on the healthcare system behind the scenes, and they’ve cultivated a huge, $425 billion per year industry, needlessly and shamelessly raising death rates for a quick buck. Again, just a theory.
